Musings On The Future of Runes of Magic’s World-size

Part of the good and bad about RMT(Real Money Transaction) games is they tend to be free-to-play but small. I certainly would love to see some of the F2P games have much larger game worlds but RMT lends itself to much smaller companies and employee base. It’s part of how the business makes money.

Runes of Magic has some 11-12 zones. I’m guessing from memory. It doesn’t matter because the difference in size compared to say WoW is so vast that me being accurate isn’t all that important for this post.

Granted the new zone Aotulia Voclano is double the size of most of the other zones, it still all adds up to the entire world of Taborea fitting into maybe less than 4 zones from WoW(out of what? around 100 zones).

So far RoM is successful and registrations continue to rise. It is hard to be accurate on this point as well. I believe they are looking at individual website registrations. So even if some of those people effectively stop playing for good, they may still be registered and count toward the overall number.

I digress. The game has been out for roughly a year and they’ve released the zones Ravenfell, Weeping Coast, Savage Lands, and Aotulia Vocano. Kudos for them. If they keep up with their announcements of new major content expansions every 4 months, the game could start to get pretty large.

There’s a rumor(I can’t confirm) that the devs told Closed Beta players that their initial plans were to have 80 zones by 2 years. Based on their progress and lack of any other similar communication since then makes it unlikely to happen. What is likely though, is that this game very well could get large-As large as a triple-A MMORPG.

We’ve already had hints through various interviews with Frogster and Runewaker staff members that they’re planning on other races(dwarves were actually name dropped by staff). RunesDB.com and Buffed.com have many items and characters that show through data mining that aren’t implemented yet. The world lore hints at another whole continent. And many features show that they can grow much larger in size.

If they can keep up with the speed and size of the updates they’ve already proven to be able to implement, I will be a very happy player.

I don’t know how long I will be playing RoM, but it’s been a year and I still enjoy it. It’s going to be very interesting and exciting to see how large and how fast the world grows.